Category: On Writing
Downton Abbey On Repeat
No one is allowed inside the veterinarian office due to state regulations during the pandemic. The parking lot is full. Car hatchbacks swung up to the sky, doors left open, a stray foot extended into a spot of late-afternoon sun. Because it’s hot many keep their doors closed, the cars running. We are waiting for […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Donna Miscolta
Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories Set in California in the 1960s and ’70s, Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories takes Angie year by thorny year from kindergarten through high school, offering an often humorous, sometimes biting, but always compassionate portrait of the artist as a shy, awkward Mexican-American girl. Taking place against the backdrop of the Cold War […]
Sparring the Pandemic
When the bell rang, I tore loose the black Velcro straps with my teeth and pulled off my yellow leather boxing gloves. Quickly I unstrapped my padded helmet and tilted it back on my head. I wanted more air on me. Sweat streamed down my face and neck; my breath came hard and I grit […]
Priming the Writing Pump: Dolls as My Muse
On days the words didn’t flow, I made dolls. It wasn’t an escape; it was my method of priming the pump to access messages that were trying to come through. It was a way to step easily into creative flow, an act of physically manifesting my muse. I had devoted seven years to a rich […]
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter: Excerpt
FAMILY IN SIX TONES is a dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter–exploring their complicated relationship and touching on war and past tragedy, culture clash and bullying, and growing up both as individuals and as a family. We are delighted to feature this excerpt. From FAMILY IN SIX […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Daniella Bernett Interviews Emmeline Kirby and Gregory Longdon
OLD SINS NEVER DIE Never look back…Treason is deadly While in the Lake District, journalist Emmeline Kirby and jewel thief/insurance investigator Gregory Longdon overhear a man attempting to hire international assassin Hugh Carstairs, a MI5 agent who went rogue. They race back to London to warn Philip Acheson of the Foreign Office and Superintendent Oliver […]
Excerpt of THE SMALLEST OBJECTIVE
The subject of memory is foremost in The Smallest Objective, a memoir of loss and retrieval set during the years when the author’s mother is afflicted with dementia. For World Alzheimer’s Month—September—Sharon Kirsch offers this abridged excerpt from her memoir. In the section below, the author becomes mesmerized by her aunt’s wedding—a subject that remained […]
EXCERPT OF AN AMBIGUOUS GRIEF
Dominique Hunter experienced one of the greatest tragedies most mothers can imagine: the death of a child. Her son Dylan died as a young man, having suffered for many years with debilitating anxiety, OCD, and ADD. In An Ambiguous Grief, she reckons with her loss by engaging in conversation with Dylan and employing the most flexible tool in […]
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter is a multigenerational memoir co-written by acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist, lawyer and professor Lan Cao and her daughter Harlan Margaret Van Cao. After more than forty years in the United States, Lan still feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, one which she came […]
The First Rung On The Author Ladder By Penny Batchelor
At a women’s writing conference I went to in 2019 the most memorable advice that stuck with me is that getting published doesn’t mean you’ve reached the top of the ladder – you’re only on the first rung. For a writer who had only just received the holy grail of publishing deal at first this […]
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